
Today, we're excited to announce Boards, a new way to automate document heavy workflows.

80% of the data every business deals with is in the form of emails, PDF, pictures, documents or some other unstructured form. Boards structure this information, automate data entry and help you run your business more efficiently.

## Why we're building Boards

With the advent of AI, we believe software should mould itself to your business rather than your business moulding to the software. Truly flexible software today comes in the form of either Excel, Google Sheets, or an expensive ERP solution. We've learnt from customers that graduating from a Google Sheet to an ERP is a painful process. ERPs are inflexible, costly to implement and tough to maintain.

Boards are our answer to this problem.

## Boards are flexible

Boards are flexible. You can set up a board that captures all the information you need for your business. For example, if your Finance process requires invoices to contain a specific field, you can add this to your board.

We also realise that business processes often change. You might find yourself requiring a new piece of information that doesn't exist on your board. We've made it easy to add new fields to your board. When you do, we'll offer to extract information from the source document and populate the board.

## Automating data entry

Emplyoees spend far too much time extracting information from PDFs, documents and emails. Typcially, this information is entered into other software like an accounting system or ERP. Boards eleminate the need for data entry.

Whenever you add a file to your board, we extract data from the file using the structure you've defined for your board. We believe this saves time and increases accuracy for a variety of business processes.

## Automations

Going forward, we will be adding automations to boards. For example, we can automatically route documents to the right person based on the information in the document. We can also automatically check for errors in the document and flag them to the right person. We're excited to see what you use boards for.

## Use cases

Here are some use cases we think Boards will be useful for:

- Processing all invoices received over email
- Capture expenses by forwarding receipts and invoices to a board
- Handle incoming queries and sales orders in a board
- Manage all your contracts in one place

## Demo

Check out a demo of how Kili can do this for you [here](https://www.loom.com/share/8893fd608ab842c39298db7a93a640f7).


Announcing Boards


We're excited to announce that Kili is now open to everyone. Kili helps you automate repetitive tasks. We wanted to write a short note explaining our vision and why we're excited about it.

Large language models (LLMs) will help us automate many of the tasks we do today. LLMs provide intelligence on the fly, and we believe we are only scratching the surface of what's possible with this technology.

Importantly, we want this technology to be available to everyone. Most of the work we do today is tedious and repetitive. Teams rely on their engineering counterparts to automate processes, or rely on software that is available off the shelf. With the power of LLMs, we believe it's now possible to build an automation within minutes. This means software can be customised and built for what you need rather than the other way around - you having to mould to what the software does under the hood.

To achieve our vision, we believe the user interface is critical. We've had no-code and low-code apps for many years. They've grown in popularity but are limited either by inflexibility, their complexity or both. Kili is our attempt to build the next version of this using LLMs from the ground up.

We believe chat interfaces are great for their simplicity. They do not work for complex tasks. On the other hand, most people think visually. Visual node-based user interfaces attempt to solve for this but are typically complex with many elements and buttons. Our user interface combines the best of both worlds. It allows users to review their task from a visual point of view, and leverage our AI assistant to build or manage their automation.

Our assistant and the visual canvas share the same information. This means the assistant can take actions for you that update the canvas. The assistant can zoom in and answer a question about a specific step, or zoom out and figure out what you should do next to achieve the goal of your automation.

Sign up for a free account [here](https://app.kili.so/auth/signup) and check out the demo video [here](). We're excited to see what you build!


Why we're building Kili


The accounts payable department is responsible for paying suppliers. The function is responsible for validating that invoice information is accurate and for ensuring payments are made in time.

This process is highly time consuming for Finance teams. In addition to the time required for this process, accuracy is critical. Over and underpaying invoices both have significant consequences for businesses. For companies that deal with a large number of invoices, fraud can also be a concern.

With the power of AI, companies can consider automating large parts of the invoice process. This allows the accounts payable team to get through more invoices and focus on the ones that really matter. The invoice process can be broken down into a few steps:

## Extract information

Most invoices are received over email. Information about the invoice is provided in an attachment, usually a PDF. There's also important information that may be contained in the body of the email. The first step is extracting information from both these sources. Most tools use OCR, which has worked well to date. With the advent of large language models, this can be significantly improved.

## Validate information

Once data has been extracted from the invoice, it needs to be validated. Every business has its own rules for validating invoices and any automation tool should accomodate these rules.

The first step of validation is checking that all relevant information is present on the invoice. For example, if your business requires a VAT number, this should be validated on the data that was extracted. If the data is missing, the invoice can be flagged to a member of the accounts payable team or an email can be sent automatically to the vendor.

Once all fields have been validated, it's important to match the invoice against POs, reciepts or other internal records. This often called the 3 way matching system. It helps separate invoices into matched and unmatched invoices. By leveraging AI, this matching process can be automated so that your team spends time on invoices that are either very large, unmatched or both.

## Approval of invoices

Most businesses will have an approval chain for invoices.

Typically, invoices are routed to the right person using the supplier name, the amount or both. Once again, these rules differ from business to business. It's critical that the tool allows these rules to be customised. This process can break whenever someone leaves the organisation or moves to a different department. It is critical that the tool flags instances where the approval chain is broken.

## Entering information into your ERP or accounting software

One of the most time consuming parts of this process is inputting data into the ERP or accounting software that your business uses.

ERP systems require information in a specific format. On the other hand, every invoice you receive is generated by the vendor's ERP system and is therefore in a different format. This means your accounts payable department has to manually transform this data into the relevant format and then insert into the ERP. This process is very error prone.

The best invoice processing software will perform this task automatically. It will transform the information extracted from the invoice, transform it into the format you need and push it directly to your ERP system. With the power of LLMs and AI, this process can be highly automated.

## Measuring success

With any automation process, it's important to measure success.

In the case of invoice processing, success can be measured using a few metrics. Processing time measures the time between the receipt and payment of an invoice. Error rate measures the number of times there was a duplicate payment, data error or payment error. In addition to these core metrics, it's useful to look at the average approval time. This helps identify if the problem is with your team's approvals or with a different part of the process. Finally, it's always helpful to understand how satisfied suppliers are.

## Automating invoices with Kili

Kili provides an out of the box solution to automate invoices received over email. Our digital worker will automatically identify emails related to invoices, parse them, extract information and push them to your ERP. The process can be customised to your business' needs. Our builder allows you to define specific approval chains, automated checks and more.

Check out a demo of how Kili can do this for you [here](https://share.descript.com/view/aWp427l3IRX).


Automate invoice processing


Every job involves some amount of repetitive work. The account executive who needs to enter information into their CRM, or the HR executive who needs to answer the same question about paid time off.

If these tasks are repetitive, why hasn't software delivered on the promise of automation? Usually, there are two reasons: first, the task may be ever so slightly different when you choose to do it. Second, the effort of automating the task may have exceeded the value of doing so.

## Thinking on the fly

Large language models (LLMs) allow us to address both of these issues, unlocking automation like never before. It is now possible to build automations that are fluid. Consider the sales executive who needs to keep their CRM up to date. The information required to update the CRM lives in calls, emails and any notes they've taken. If they need to format this information for the CRM, they may as well just do it via the Salesforce (or whatever CRM they use) user interface.

On the other hand, if the update happened automatically by plugging into these resources, it would save the Account Executive precious time. Time that can be spent following up with leads and closing more deals. Large language models make this possible because they provide intelligence on the fly. The LLM can summarise the content and format it for the CRM. In the best case scenario, the AE needs to do nothing because information moves seamlessly into the CRM.

## Human in the loop

In some cases, we will find that AI needs to work in partnership with a human. The best example of this is the financial operations function. Every business needs to receive invoices, check them and pay vendors. This is typically handled by an accounts payable function.

Today, most businesses have software that helps with this but the automation is incomplete. This is because every business has it's unique process for handling invoices, and because every invoice looks different. Traditional automation tools like robotic process automation have low success rates because of this variance in the process.

LLMs address this shortcoming because they allow us to process information that may not always follow the same structure, like invoices. They significantly improve accuracy and reduce fraud. Even with LLMs, you require a human in the loop to avoid any chance of a mistake. The difference though is that it allows your team to handle more invoices whilst simultaneously improving reliability.

This human, AI collaboration also allows your team to work on the most pressing issues. For example, an invoice that looks fraudulent or resolving an issue that may have sent the funds to the wrong bank account.

## Employees managing digital workers

At Kili, we believe AI will enable every employee to 10x their output. We believe they will do so by managing digital workers that complete repetitive tasks for them. Instead of spending time getting context from different systems, employees will be able to spend time on what decision to make.

We believe in a world where AI quietly does work for your team in the background, and only reaches out to them when they need to make a decision. We're excited for this future and are building for it.

Join our closed beta if you're interested in leveraging this capability for your business.


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Announcing Boards

Why we're building Kili

Automate invoice processing

Delegate your repetitive tasks